A Permanent Breakdown in Communications

Slate ponders how to communicate the danger of radioactive waste to the far future. The problem is, if they can't read English, or recognize the radiation trefoil, anything you do sounds more likely to intrigue future anthropologists than to warn them off:

Even if future trespassers could understand what keep and out
mean when placed side by side, there's no reason to assume they'd
follow directions. In "Expert Judgment," the panelists observe that
"[m]useums and private collections abound with [keep out signs] removed
from burial sites." The tomb of the ancient Egyptian vizier Khentika
(also known as Ikhekhi), for example, contains the inscription: "As for
all men who shall enter this my tomb ... impure ... there will be judgment
... an end shall be made for him. ... I shall seize his neck like a bird. ...
I shall cast the fear of myself into him." It's possible that the
vizier's contemporaries took Khentika at his word. But 20th-century
archaeologists with wildly different religious beliefs had no reason to
take the neck-cracking threat seriously. Likewise, a scavenger on the
Carlsbad site in the year 12,000 C.E. may dismiss the menace of
radiation poisoning as mere superstition. ("So I'm supposed to think
that if I dig here, invisible energy beams will kill me?") Hence the
crux of the problem: Not only must intruders understand the message
that nuclear waste is near and dangerous; they must also believe it.

The
report's proposed solution is a layered message--one that conveys not
only that the site is dangerous but that there's a legitimate
(nonsuperstitious) reason to think so. It should also emphasize that
there's no buried treasure, just toxic trash. Here's how the authors
phrase the essential talking points: "[T]his place is not a place of
honor ... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here." Finally, the
marker system should communicate that the danger--an emanation of
energy--is unleashed only if you disturb the place physically, so it's
best left uninhabited.

As for the problem of actually getting these essentials across, the
report proposes a system of redundancy--a fancy way of saying throw everything at the wall and hope that something sticks. Giant, jagged earthwork berms
should surround the area. Dozens of granite message walls or kiosks,
each 25 feet high, might present graphic images of human faces
contorted with horror, terror, or pain (the inspiration here is Edvard Munch's Scream)
as well as text in English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic,
and Navajo explaining what's buried. This variety of languages, as
Charles Piller remarked in a 2006 Los Angeles Times
story, turns the monoliths into quasi-Rosetta stones. Three rooms--one
off-site but nearby, one centrally located, and one underground--would
serve as information centers with more detailed explanations of nuclear
waste and its hazards, maps showing the location of similar sites
around the world, and star charts to help intruders calculate the year
the site was sealed. According to 1994 estimates, the whole shebang
would cost about $68 million, but that's just a ballpark figure based
on very incomplete data.

Proposals for the "earthworks" component demonstrate that the whole
project of communicating with the future is really a creative
assignment, more dependent on the imagination than on expertise.
What'll really scare off 210th-century tomb raiders? The
report proposes a "Landscape of Thorns" with giant obelisklike stones
sticking out of the earth at odd angles. "Menacing Earthworks" has
lightning-shaped mounds radiating out of a square. In "Forbidding
Blocks," a Lego city gone terribly wrong, black, irregular stones "are
set in a grid, defining a square, with 5-foot wide 'streets' running
both ways. You can even get 'in' it, but the streets lead nowhere, and
they are too narrow to live in, farm in, or even meet in."

I know I'd want to get to the heart of the mystery if I came across any of those setups.

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